1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for coding a CCFI (Control Channel Format Indicator) channel, also known as PCFICH (Physical Control Format Indicator Channel), and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for coding a CCFI channel using a concatenation of repeated (3,2) codewords and original CCFI bits, for the case where a total result coded length of CCFI is not an integer multiple of three.
2. Description of the Related Art
Three references of the present invention are listed as below.    [1]. 3GPP RAN WG1#48bis Chairman's Notes, March 2007, Malta.    [2]. R1-050271, “Evaluation of Diversity in Evolved UTRA”, Samsung, RAN1#40bis, Beijing China, April 2005.    [3]. “Transmit Diversity for Acknowledgement and Category 0 bits in a Wireless communication System”, earlier filed provisional in the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office on 26 Apr. 2007 and there duly assigned Ser. No. 60/924,020 and earlier filed provisional in the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office on 9 May 2007 and there duly assigned Ser. No. 60/924,339.
Reference [3] discusses several approaches of coding and transmit diversity for both the Category 0 bits and ACK/NACK channels.
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a technology to multiplex data in frequency domain. Modulation symbols are carried on frequency sub-carriers. The total bandwidth in an OFDM system is divided into narrowband frequency units called subcarriers. The number of subcarriers is equal to the FFT/IFFT size N used in the system. In general, the number of subcarriers used for data is less than N because some of the subcarriers located at the edge of the frequency spectrum are reserved as guard subcarriers. In general, no information may be transmitted on guard subcarriers.
A typical cellular radio system includes a collection of fixed base stations (BS) that define a radio coverage area or a cell. Typically, a non-line-of-sight (NLOS) radio propagation path exists between a base station and a mobile station due to natural and man-made objects that are situated between the base station and the mobile station. As a consequence, the radio waves propagate via reflections, diffractions and scattering. The arriving waves at the mobile station (MS) in the downlink direction (at the BS in the uplink direction) experience constructive and destructive additions because of different phases of the individual waves. This is due the fact that, at high carrier frequencies typically used in the cellular wireless communication, small changes in the differential propagation delays introduces large changes in the phases of the individual waves. When the MS is moving or changes occur in the scattering environment, the spatial variations in the amplitude and phase of the composite received signal will manifest themselves as the time variations known as Rayleigh fading or fast fading. The time-varying nature of the wireless channel requires very high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in order to provide desired bit error or packet error reliability.
Diversity is widely used to combat the effect of fast fading. The idea is to provide the receiver with multiple faded replicas of the same information-bearing signal. On the assumption of independent fading of each of the antenna branches, the probability that the instantaneous SNR is below a certain threshold on each branch is approximately pL where p is the probability that the instantaneous SNR is below the certain threshold on each antenna branch.
The methods of diversity generally fall into the following categories: space, angle, polarization, field, frequency, time and multipath diversity. Space diversity may be achieved by using multiple transmit or receive antennas. The spatial separation between the multiple antennas is chosen so that the diversity branches experience fading with little or no correlation. Transmit diversity uses multiple transmit antennas in order to provide the receiver with multiple uncorrelated replicas of the same signal. Transmit diversity schemes may further be divided into open loop transmit diversity and closed-loop transmit diversity schemes. In an open loop transmit diversity approach, no feedback is required from the receiver. In a known arrangement of a closed loop transmit diversity, the receiver computes the phase and amplitude adjustment that should be applied at the transmitter antennas to maximize the received signal power at the receiver. In another arrangement of the closed loop transmit diversity referred to as selection transmit diversity (STD), the receiver provides feedback information to the transmitter on antennas) to be used for transmission.
Dynamic Category 0 (Cat 0) bits are a LTE terminology used in 3GPP LTE standard body. The role of Cat0 is to support dimensioning (scaling) of the downlink control channel by indicating the number of downlink and uplink scheduling grants. The current working assumption in reference [1] is that the dynamic Cat0 bits have a maximum size of two bits, and the dynamic Cat0 bits should be transmitted once during every subframe where a control channel element (CCE) is present. The information conveyed by Cat0 bits includes, but not limited to, the number of OFDM symbols used for all control channels in the subframe. The transmit diversity of the Cat0 bits is not finalized, and it is the objective of the present invention to provide a simple and efficient transmit diversity scheme that captures both spatial and frequency diversity in the channel. In reference [3], several approaches of coding and transmit diversity have been described for both the Category 0 bits and ACK/NACK channels. In the 3GPP standard RAN1 meeting in May 2007, the Category 0 bits have been renamed as CCFI (Control Channel Format Indicator). In the present invention, one additional coding method is proposed, as well as frequency domain resource mapping methods for the transmission of CCFI channel.
In addition, it was proposed in reference [3] to use a (3,2,2) binary linear code to map the 2 Cat0 bits into a 3-bit codeword c1c2c3, and this codeword belongs to a codebook of size four with a minimum Hamming distance two between any pairs of codewords. One example of the (3,2) codebook in reference [3] is c1c2c3εC1={111, 100, 010 001}.
Because the size of (3,2) codebook as above presented is three, merely repeating the 3-bit codeword may only be suitable for a case where the length of a coded CCFI is an integer multiple of three. Therefore, it is important to provide a CCFI coding method in a case where the length of a coded CCFI is not an integer multiple of three.